Netflix returned to the upfronts on Wednesday afternoon with a presentation that, at first, looked like it might be a production of Waiting for Gadot.
At first looking awfully serious, Jude Law and Jason Bateman stood in respective spotlights on an otherwise empty stage at downtown’s Perelman Performing Arts Center in Manhattan. But the facade soon cracked. The dependably sardonic Bateman set up a trailer for their new series, Black Rabbit, as Law played his part and pushed one of the streamer’s chosen slogans of the day: “Welcome to the center of attention.”
The messaging has not changed since the last dog and pony show for media buyers: Netflix has achieved cultural ubiquity in a manner that no other streamer has come close. Naturally, it is the best place for advertising. Right? Right? Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising, kicked off a one-ish hour spiel by reiterating that point — albeit with some new data to share.
Since last year’s upfront, monthly active users on an ad-supported tier of Netflix jumped from 40 to 90 million globally. Members on such plans, said Reinhard, spent an average 41 hours a month viewing Netflix. She also said that’s how much time the average person spends eating and drinking, but let’s agree to disagree.
There was something refreshingly un-desperate about the Netflix pitch, whether that was a facade or not. The 2025 returns for top titles Squid Game, Wednesday and Stranger Things were echoed over and over again. And while there was new Wednesday footage, much to the delight of many in the most intimate theater of the week, things remain silent on the Stranger Things front. It was just another reel of BTS, like the one Netflix screened at a pep rally earlier in the year.
Once chief content officer Bela Bajaria took the stage from CMO Marian Lee, on hand to push branding marriages between TurboTax and the WWE, the programming news came fast and furious. It’s all already been written about elsewhere, but it should be mentioned that when Bajaria described upcoming drama The Body as “Bring it On meets The Crucible,” she possibly became the only executive to warrant a genuine laugh from an audience this week — at least intentionally.
Talent was in no short supply but hardly overwhelming. Stranger Things‘ Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp and Gaten Matarazzo, each of them now very much adults, were followed by Taraji P. Henson, Sherri Shepherd and Teyana Taylor (Tyler Perry’s Straw), the entire cast of Nobody Wants This and, one of the more impressive gets of the week, Charlize Theron. The Oscar winner stopped by in a very short dress — “Bela needed pants, so I gave her mine,” she explained — to hype Old Guard 2 and screen an early teaser for thriller Apex. The Oscar winner said she’d just wrapped production in Australia last week.
With all that on deck, which Bajaria (and a slide) called “slates not slots,” it’s no wonder she took issue with a certain narrative. “It’s time to redefine Peak TV,” she said, dismissing the overall decline in production for a chart of minutes watched over the course of a year. “We peak every week… and as others are pulling back, we are investing more.”
The biggest investment of all might be the NFL. After a successful foray in 2024, Netflix set its second year of Christmas games on Wednesday. And in a major vote of confidence, league commissioner Roger Goodell made an appearance. He even donned a vinyl Santa suit to reveal this year’s match-ups: The Cowboys and The Commanders followed by The Lions and The Vikings.
Go Lions.
But the football didn’t end there. Jerry Jones, the owner, president and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, moseyed out to join Goodell and go off script with some self-mythologizing and something about being happy to have met Rupert Murdoch. I truly couldn’t follow, but cue the trailer for his Netflix documentary America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys.
The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders then landed the plane with an enthusiastic performance choreographed to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” before yet another confetti canon exploded, signaling that another year of upfront presentations was almost at a close. If only the Vatican were a fan of that kind of theatrics…
On a not unrelated note, I’d like to take this final dispatch from New York to remind adults everywhere — particularly media buyers — that you can be by yourself in public every once in a while. I witnessed the verbal assault of several ushers this week and countless displays of Elaine Benes energy, all in the name of sitting next to co-workers. These are basically just big PowerPoint presentations with a few heavily scripted celebrities, folks. Calm down.